The Emphasis of Luck

People often underestimate how much of a factor luck plays in success, especially in the NBA. Virtually everything that an NBA player does involves luck to an extent. Shooting is one of the critical acts that an NBA player performs, and it is almost entirely based on luck. Dribbling involves luck to an extent too. In order to excute trick moves and cross overs, luck is neccessary. Then there is one of the more obvious aspects of the NBA that require luck, game winners. Luck is crucial and in order to become a great NBA player, an abundance of it must be present.

There is the jump shot which requires the most luck. Regardless of much a player practices, they most likely will not be able to perfect their muscle coordination so that the ball always goes in the net. A player can spend endless hours practicing the jump shot and still go 0-10 any given night if they’re not lucky. Not everyone is always lucky which is why we don’t see many spot up shooters in the all star game. There are obviously many other things that play a part in a jump shot including set up time, wrist rotation and countless others but come on do you really think that a player is thinking about all that in the split second that they have to shoot? It also depends if the jump shot is contested or not. A contested jump shot is 80-90% luck while an open one is around 30-50% luck. When a player shoots an open jumper, they have time to think about all the things that they should do for the shot to go in. They have adequete time to set up, and can release the ball without worry that it will get blocked. When a player is contested though, it is much harder. There is no time at all to set up, a pump fake or fadeaway is sometimes neccessary to even get the shot up and no clear view of the location of the basket is guaranteed. Which often leads to what you see here.

Next there is dribbling or in particular dribbling moves like crossovers. In order to crossover well, you need the man who is guarding you to go one way while you dribble the opposite direction. You need to count on the person that you’re guarding to go a certain way which is luck. It can either work perfectly on a lucky day or not so perfect on an unlucky day.

Next there are game winners. You can’t practice a game winning shot, it’s all luck like here.

Luck is a crucial part of the NBA, it is involved in many aspects of the game. An unlucky player is a horrible one, an example being Travis Outlaw of the New Jersey Nets. A lucky player is usually great, an example being Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers. There are ways around luck like driving and playing good defense but 50% of basketball is luck and the other 50% is hard work. Both parts are critical and present in an NBA superstar